Ladies and gentlemen, hello and welcome to the OCI N.V. Q4 2022 results call. My name is Maxine, and I'll be coordinating the call today. If you would like to ask a question during the presentation, you may do so by pressing star followed by 1 on your telephone keypad. I will now hand you over to your host, Hans Zayed, Director, Investor Relations, to begin. Hans, please go ahead when you're ready.
Yes, good afternoon and good morning to our audience in the U.S. Thank you for joining the OCI N.V. Q4 and full year 2022 conference call. With me today are Ahmed El-Hoshy, our Chief Executive Officer, and Hassan Badrawi, our Chief Financial Officer. On this call, we will review OCI's key operational events and financial highlights for the quarter, followed by a discussion of OCI's outlook. As usual, at the end of the call, we will wrap up with a Q&A. The results press release and accompanying presentation are available on our website at oci.nl in the investors section, and we will be referring to slides in the results presentation during this call. I would like to remind you that any forward-looking statements made on this call involve risks, and the actual results could differ materially from those statements.
Let me hand over to Ahmed.
Thank you, Hans, and thank you all for joining us today. Today, Hassan and I will provide some additional perspective on the recent results as well as the various initiatives which are covered in the material we published this morning. We are very pleased with what the OCI team has achieved during the calendar year 2022. We reported record results, which has allowed us to reset our balance sheet to return capital to shareholders for the first time in over a decade, and have worked diligently to reposition the company to pursue and accelerate sustainability-focused projects across our geographically advantaged global platform to drive our future growth through the cycle and to have a clear path forward for decarbonization. I'd like to thank all our team members for their contributions to our achievements over the past year.
We start every call with reaffirming our strong commitment to safety, which remains our top priority. We've reported a 12-month rolling recordable incident rate at the end of December 2022 of 0.38 incidents per 200,000 man-hours. Despite beating industry averages, we continue our relentless focus on operational and process safety throughout the organization because of how vital and important it is for our people and our operations. As we go through the presentation today, we'll walk through the Q4 and fiscal year 2022 results, both financial and operational. We'll also, as usual, talk about the market outlook, both near term as well as medium and long term.
For our projects, we're going to provide an update on the existing growth initiatives, which many of you know of, as well as some new and exciting prospects we're looking at, particularly in the fuel space that we've been developing over the last year plus. With that, I'd like to hand it over to Hassan Badrawi, our CFO, to discuss our financial performance.
Thank you, Ahmed. We are pleased to report an outstanding year for the company. During 2022, we generated free cash flow of $1.9 billion after minorities and before growth CapEx. This allowed us to reset our balance sheet, achieving an investment-grade rating for both OCI and Fertiglobe from all three rating agencies. It also allowed us to return $1.1 billion to our shareholders during the calendar year through capital repayments for the first time in a decade, representing around 15% of our average market cap in 2022. Despite these distributions, our net debt declined by $1.06 billion during the year, reaching a consolidated net leverage ratio of 0.3 times as of the end of 31st December 2022.
We further announced an upcoming semi-annual dividend distribution scheduled for April 2023 of three and a half EUR per share or the equivalent of $785 million at current exchange rates, million dollars. Fertiglobe refinanced a $900 million dollar bridge loan in Q4 into a $300 million dollar three-year and a $600 million dollar five-year term loans. The transaction was heavily oversubscribed and delivers a conservative capital structure to support future growth projects. Fertiglobe in parallel increased its backstop RCF from $300 million to $600 million. This is in addition to an undrawn RCF facility at OCI of $1.1 billion as of year-end.
Looking at slide 7, we have successfully de-risked our balance sheet and remained disciplined with our capital allocation approach, balancing both our sustainability focus with shareholder value creation. As you can see, robust free cash flow generation has helped create shareholder value, which can be seen in lower leverage metrics and distributions made to shareholders. The positive market outlook and growth prospects position us well to continue to create shareholder value. Turning to slide 8 and our financial results, some brief remarks there. For the full year 2022, we reported revenue of $9.7 billion, adjusted EBITDA of $3.9 billion, and adjusted net profit of $1.3 billion.
In Q4 of 2022, we reported revenue of $2.2 billion, an adjusted EBITDA of $669 million, and adjusted net profit of $205 million. OCI was effectively free cash flow neutral in Q4 after distributions to minorities. Total distributions to minorities during 2022 amounted to $1.1 billion compared to $443 million in 2021. Our Q4 results were impacted by several factors. Firstly, nitrogen selling prices declined in Q4 amid lower natural gas pricing in Europe, which also resulted in demand deferral into 2023. Despite higher ammonia and nitrate prices in Q4, it was more than offset by lower urea prices and lower deliveries, primarily in Europe.
Results were further impacted by a heavy turnaround schedule in Q4, which not only impacted volume, but also typically impacts plant efficiencies and costs. We also reported realized natural gas hedge losses of a net amount of $43 million, comprised of a negative $49 million in Europe that was partially offset by a net gain in the US. Looking at the year overall, including our share of Natgasoline, we have a total positive realized natural gains of around $92 million. We quantified the negative impact of the US winter freeze to be around $20 million, which resulted in outages and logistical constraints across the industry. From a year-over-year perspective, we highlight a negative result of, on EAs, of $16 million compared to a positive number in Q4 last year of $91 million, excluding the FX impact.
Turning to page 9, looking at our business segment performance, a few highlights to mention there as well. The performance of our US nitrogen segment, which encompasses IFCO and our N-7 distribution business, generated an adjusted EBITDA of $744 million and free cash flow of $483 million. This is a significant step-up compared to last year, reflecting its competitive positioning in the premium US Midwest market, its leading position in DEF, and overall improved operational performance. The adjusted margin for the underlying manufacturing business was around 68%. Secondly, our European business continues to benefit from its resilient operating model, which allows us to import ammonia and maximize operating rates of downstream products. This continues to be an important feature in a volatile gas spot environment in Europe.
Our methanol results reflect both our gray methanol business and our fast-growing FUSE business, which contributed to the tune of $84 million of our EBITDA, positioning us as the world's number one producer of low-carbon biomethanol. Finally, our Abu Dhabi-listed Fertiglobe subsidiary also achieved record results in 2022. OCI received during the year $545 million in dividends and is slated to receive an additional $350 million based on the announced distribution of $700 million that is slated for April 2023. Our balance sheet is strong and will support our growth projects, where we will always operate within our investment-grade framework and continue to maintain a strong capital discipline to minimize our capital outlays and maximize shareholder returns.
With this, I'd like to hand over to Ahmed to provide further commentary on our outlook and strategic initiatives. Ahmed, back to you.
Thanks, thanks, Hassan. I'll start by sharing management's view on short and medium-term outlooks for nitrogen and methanol. Looking at page 11, the market fundamentals for nitrogen remain healthy despite the recent declines in pricing we've seen over the last several months. There's no doubt an extremely mild winter, an almost historic winter, has resulted in lower European gas pricing, which has in turn had an impact on marginal cost of production and ultimately buying patterns, particularly in Europe and the U.S., resulting in demand deferral until the demand is basically right in front of them.
We have seen an acceleration in nitrogen demand in the short-term, given the best nitrogen affordability and farmer profitability metrics we've seen in years, and substantial pent-up demand. In the U.S., you know, before the price drop, we saw one of the best fall ammonia seasons on record in Q4.
UAN and urea coverage for spring is lagging behind last year by over 30%, with significant catch-up demand expected once the season starts in March, providing room for much higher seed pricing in season. In Europe, due to warm weather, we're seeing an earlier start to the season compared to norms. Once first application starts, we should start seeing buying pickup in season with as much, with needs for as much of 3 million-4 million tons of urea expected to be imported before June. We're already starting to see a little bit of that early pickup as we speak in both the urea as well as the nitrates market just in the last few days. The Indian urea tender has also been delayed from December and is expected quite imminently for delivery in April or earlier.
Sales in India in 2022 were up 12%, while at the same time domestic production fell short, with Indian imports up 2 million tons year-over-year in 2022. Imports in 2023 are expected to be around 8 million tons, India will need to issue frequent tenders through the end of the year to replenish stocks and support harvest demand. This combined with regular seasonal demand from Brazil, Australia, and commitments to Ethiopia, which, on the Fertiglobe side, some of you know that we are about half the 500,000 tons to Ethiopia, are also still to be delivered, except for the 50,000 tons we delivered in December. We also should see lower inventories at the end of Q1 and Q2 once demand picks up.
Industrial outlook has also improved, particularly in Europe and Asia, supported by the lower energy complex and the emergence from the zero COVID policy in China, for example. This has been supportive of ammonia demand as the industrial sector consumes more than 50% of ammonium that's imported in those regions, both Europe and Asia. Going over to slide 12. Medium-term outlook for nitrogen also remains quite tight based on 4 key structural drivers we've discussed at length in the past. You know, we see tight supply and demand fundamentals in the next 3, 4 years when you look at the urea markets.
We also see on the ammonia side, only one project coming online later this year in the U.S., and the next one of size is the project we FID in Texas, which starts in early 2025. Most of the other low carbon ammonia projects that have been announced have not reached FID, so we believe capacity could take quite some time to commission. Furthermore, crop fundamentals and higher farm profitability remains positive for nitrogen demand. As you saw throughout the materials, the critical grain stocks remain to be low, and grain prices are really incentivizing, particularly at current nitrogen prices, the application of nitrogen to increase yield and make a return.
It's no surprise that you're seeing, you know, corn acreage look to be 93 million acres this year because there's a big incentive to plant for corn, and we see a bit above-trend demand for urea for at least the next two seasons. European gas pricing did reset materially to lower levels, as we discussed earlier, which resulted in a decrease in sentiment and pricing. The gas price environment for the marginal cost producer still remains higher than it was in the 2015 to 2020 period materially, and is around $17 MMBtu through the end of 2024, which provides supported levels of, for ammonia at approximately $650 a ton, excluding CO2, and that's just marginal cash costs that are variable, sorry, cash costs.
Lastly, the environmental focus, we've seen less gray capacity additions, more time to get the support, to get the financing in for some of the clean additions and continued closures in China with the focus on the environment. Furthermore, as we've discussed in the past, significant clean ammonia demand, starting up particularly towards the middle of the decade. On the methanol side, the market outlook is much more positive than the last time we spoke in both the short and medium term. This is reflected in the price momentum we've seen so far. We've seen spot prices come up by over 10% from the lows we saw in Q4. We see demand that's expected to rebound quite firmly over the next several months and quarters when we see an improved industrial outlook in Europe and Asia.
Similar to what we discussed on ammonia, but probably even more so, the market expects a significant rebound in China, driven by the end of the zero COVID policy after three years, and that further supports global industrial demand and should also result in higher MTO operating rates from the least recent lows we've witnessed of approximately 60%. For those keeping track, I'm on page 14. The supply side also remains tight with very limited new additions in the near to medium term, with only one major expansion outside of China coming in the U.S. towards the end of this year. If you look at slide, at the slide as well on 14, we lay out the industry view on supply and demand.
The tighter market fundamentals, as you can see through 2027, show that there's incremental demand exceeding supply by approximately 11 million tons over that period, boding well for potential tightness in that market. Furthermore, we're excited about the prospects for methanol rising from significant demand uptake as a hydrogen fuel starting from later this year, notably in the road and marine fuel sector.
Demand for European fuels markets continues to grow, with increased demand for direct blending of green methanol and bio MTBE, and we continue to add sales in our key markets of the United Kingdom as well as Germany. If we move to page 16, methanol demand from the maritime sector is expected to kick off from as early as later this year and early next year, with the first methanol-fueled ships slated for delivery at the end of the year.
This is the first methanol-fueled container ship that is. Incremental demand from the maritime sector is expected to be more than a 3 million ton per year market by the mid-2020s based on current orders from the container vessel segment alone. You know, to put that into context, today we're about 300,000 tons for methanol demand in the marine fuel sector. We see a very big exponential increase based on the significant amount of vessel orders.
We're encouraged by these orders also from the non-container segment, underscoring significant potential demand growth from current non-consumer trade segments. Our recent bunker barge announcement with Unibarge, which we announced a few weeks ago to retrofit the first ever inland methanol-powered bunker barge, demonstrates that retrofits are affordable and is an important milestone in our strategy to encourage demand for clean fuels in this growing segment.
Turning to our transformational growth projects. OCI is well-positioned to take a leading role in both the nitrogen and methanol markets to capitalize on the opportunity arising from a structural demand pull for lower carbon fuels, industrial feedstocks, and lower carbon food. If you look at slide six, just flipping back for a moment in our investor presentation, it showcases that our existing platform already has quite a diverse offering of several low carbon products. Several of our most accretive and actual projects are highlighted as well on this page, picked out from a large pool of opportunities that we've been exploring on both the nitrogen and methanol side, located in all three of our geographies.
That'll enable us to capitalize on the hydrogen opportunity and help further decarbonize our footprint for the existing customers as well as new customers. From slide 18 in the deck, you will find a deep dive of some of our key projects, which I'd like to highlight briefly here. Go to slide 18, and I'm gonna talk about 18 and 19 here. Our blue ammonia project in Texas. We recently announced that we are partnering with a world-class global leader in industrial gases and engineering, Linde, to supply our Texas blue ammonia project with 100% of its nitrogen and hydrogen needs. This is all gonna be in the form of clean hydrogen. The 1.1 million ton project is well underway and is in a key construction phase.
All major contracts have been signed, long lead items have been ordered, with first deliveries expected later this year for the procurement items. We expect to start production in early 2025, which means we expect this plant to be the first new build to capture the incremental value arising from the Inflation Reduction Act in the United States, and it'll be ready for the additional demand for low-carbon ammonia as a clean fuel in the power sector, kicking in from as early as 2025 in a material amounts. This also coincides with the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism coming into place in Europe from 2026, which is expected to accelerate the transition and raise nitrogen marginal cost floors, creating significant opportunities for us, given we'll be one of the few players with that world-scale available exportable blue ammonia. Moving on to slide 20.
Egypt green hydrogen plant started commissioning its first unit of 50 megawatts in November 2022 during COP27, and we're pleased to say that we've started production of some green hydrogen in January, still off-spec, but we're continuing to make progress as we progress this project further. Like our other projects, we're applying for various global government incentives to support the project on potentially reaching FID in 2023 for the larger 100 megawatt green hydrogen plant. Moving to the next slide. At Fertiglobe as well, we've also made progress with the 1 million ton low-carbon ammonia project in the UAE in partnership with TA'ZIZ, GS Energy, and Mitsui, where we've just signed the EPC contract with Tecnimont, an exciting step further in the journey of this milestone project.
In this project, it's worth to note that Fertiglobe is a minority investor, and we will be using project debt on this project to limit the equity outlay. Obviously, Fertiglobe will be one of the off-takers from this project, with the goal continuing to be having a low cost base in the Middle East as we expand the production profile and leverage the existing infrastructure on site there, some new builds that are gonna be shared with other industrials. Keep in mind, it's very close to our existing site, Fertial, as part of Fertiglobe. Lastly, as part of our strategy to grow our fuels business and continue to shift our methanol business towards green fuels and feedstocks, we're evaluating a gasification opportunity in the Netherlands.
To support this, we will be applying to the EU Innovation Fund. We also recently strengthened our collaboration with the Dutch government to receive essential regulatory, financial, and infrastructure support to help realize our projects faster. This is one of the key projects. This project will leverage on existing infrastructure with strong regulatory support in place from European governments to help accelerate the project. Obviously, this is at our BioMCN site, which, as you know, has been shut down for over a year and a half. It's a way to create significant potential value and have lower work to get that to the market because of all the existing supply that's in place.
This would be the first plant in the Netherlands to transform renewable biomass feedstocks derived from wood waste, agricultural waste, non-recyclable and/or non-recyclable municipal solid waste into renewable circular methanol to cater the growing demand in the low-carbon methanol space, which is in both the marine fuels demand as well as the vehicle fuel demand, and also into the chemicals market, which is also looking to decarbonize. We're very much excited about this project. We've done significant engineering work. We've been working on it for over a year, and we're excited to continue to provide updates on this project over the coming months. To conclude, we're proud of what the OCI and Fertiglobe teams have achieved so far and are very excited about the prospects for the company.
Despite recent volatility and lower nitrogen prices, market fundamentals remain solid, and we are excited to see significant upside potential from both our end markets and our low-carbon growth initiatives, where we believe we are one of the best placed in the industry given our global footprint and diversified product exposure across the hydrogen value chain into ammonia and methanol. We can leverage our existing, our legacy of executing projects and draw on lessons learned from our recent growth programs globally, fast-track the projects to remain ahead of the curve and get proper paybacks while we continue to decarbonize. With that, we will open the lines for questions.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, if you would like to ask a question, please press star followed by 1 on your telephone keypad now. If you do change your mind, please press star followed by 2. When preparing to ask your question, please ensure that your line is unmuted. Our first question comes from Christian Faitz from Kepler. Please go ahead. Your line is now open.
Yes, thank you very much, sir. Good afternoon, gentlemen. 1 question, if I may. I believe you are hedged with a good 50% or so in the U.S. on gas. Given current gas prices, should we consider a similar write-down of your hedging position like we saw in Q4? If not, what would be roughly the right number for Q1 if you were marking to market the current net gas price? I also had a demand question, Ahmed, you explained that very well already on the nitrogen demand side. Thank you.
Hassan, do you wanna take the gas mark-to-market question?
Yeah, sure. I mean, on the gas, yeah. I mean, we haven't provided any future guidance given the volatility that we see in the gas markets. It's correct that OCI, we previously shared that we're circa hedged 40% of our needs from 2023 to 2029. I think for years, of course in Fertiglobe, we know what the weighted average cost of gas is in Fertiglobe, which continues to position us well in the left side of the cost curve. I think overall, we look at this on a big picture basis, and we're comfortable with our long-term cost structure going forward.
Of course, the percentage I referred to, the 40%, includes now the future expected demand from Texas Blue with our hydrogen being sort of prices versus Henry Hub.
Okay, great. Maybe if I could sneak in one other question. Given the cold freeze in the U.S. late last year, anything to be expected in terms of outages for early Q1?
Oh, you're saying that with regards to the freeze of, late 2022?
Yeah.
There would be some overhang into the beginning of this year following some of the outages that we had. You know, we don't, give detailed guidance on where we're at, but the plants are, as of now, all running again. Did go into the beginning part of the year as well for some of the plants.
Okay. All right. Thank you very much, Ahmed and Hassan.
Thank you. As another reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press star followed by 1 on your telephone keypad now. Our next question comes from Rikin Patel from BNP Paribas. Please go ahead. Your line is now open.
Yeah. Hi. Thanks for taking my questions. Just two. Firstly, on CapEx, given the number of projects you have in your pipeline, can you just remind us what we should be assuming for 2023 and possibly thereafter as well? And then just on the market in nitrogen, could you give a sense of what you expect in the way of Russian nitrogen exports this year, and whether you expect any sort of step up once some of the domestic supply starts to ramp over there? Thanks.
I'll start with regards to the CapEx question then kinda hand over on guidance to Hassan. As we said in the press release, despite some of the new initiatives, particularly the gasification one, we still reaffirm our guidance as Hassan will share for 2023. With regards to 2024, we didn't have guidance out for 2024 specifically. We have not FID-ed this gasification project, but we will take into account our investment grade, our investment grade financial policy, our view to continue to distribute cash to shareholders, when undertaking any FID of projects, and we'll look at mechanisms including equity participants, et cetera, as necessary, to ensure that that is the case. I'll pass it over to Hassan to discuss the guidance and specifics.
Thanks, Ahmed. Yeah, I mean, I reaffirm again, of course, the commitment to the investment grade framework that we achieved earlier this year across both OCI and Fertiglobe by all three rating agencies, which was the benefit of the accelerated deleveraging that we were able to accomplish the last two years. Our total CapEx in 2022 came just under $400 million. The guidance for 2023, as Ahmed mentioned, remains largely unchanged. We mentioned, I believe in earlier call, that we have a growth estimate of between $350 million-$450 million, and our maintenance CapEx rate has sort of remained the same at a run rate in the area of $300 million.
Now granted, there can be some sort of phasing between the different years, that may affect that number from year to year, depending on when project starts. Sometimes certain projects start later in the year and can bleed over. I hope that answers your question.
Yes. Thanks.
With regards to your second question, in terms of Russia exports. Interestingly, it's a bit bizarre, you wouldn't have expected, but Russian UAN and urea exports were at record levels compared to 2021. You know, the market was receiving it. Particularly, I think as some may know, the U.S. imported quite a bit of UAN as well as urea over the last 12 months since the war began. We think that they're basically at capacity pushing that product out for urea and UAN. There's also new urea capacity that's supposed to come online, and it's in our slide deck from 2023 to 2026 of approximately 2 million tons.
From everything that we've been seeing, they've been put on hold, in terms of the ability to get licensors, equipment on site, licensors to commission, et cetera. So we don't have that in our near-term expectations to see an actual increase in some of that. In terms of ammonia is down since pre-war, approximately 70% in terms of exports. There is a potential for ammonia exports to increase. There's been talks of new ports. We haven't seen much that's been concrete, and we've seen some failures in negotiations around getting that product, which is obviously has to be handled carefully out. We're not seeing that in the, in the near to medium term, but, that's the only area where we could see probably an increase in exports at some point in the future.
Just don't know, when.
Great. Thanks a lot.
Thank you. As another reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press star followed by 1 on your telephone keypad now. Our next question comes from Frank Claassen from Degroof Petercam. Please go ahead, Frank. Your line is now open.
Yes, good afternoon. I've got two questions. First of all, on the minority payouts, dividend payouts, could you help us on the different elements? Of course, we've got Fertiglobe, but in particularly on Sorfert, could you give some color on that and also the timing of these payments? Secondly, on DEF, yeah, what kind of outlook do you have there? What kind of growth do you envisage? What is the maximum capacity at your plans to produce DEF? Thank you.
Yep. Hassan, would you like to cover the minority interest point?
Sure, I can do that. On the minorities interest distribution, as we mentioned during the call, the total for 2022 was around $1.1 billion compared to just over $440 million the previous year, I believe. I think for 2023, there is the effects of the supertaxe in Algeria within Fertiglobe, therefore obviously consolidated into OCI. I believe that number is substantially larger than previous years due to the outstanding results that we had in 2022. The number from Algeria, I believe, will be circa $800 million of distributions to our partners. Then of course, you add to that minority's leakage associated with distributions from Fertiglobe. We already announced...
Fertiglobe already announced a $700 million dividend expected in April 2023, which OCI receives, 50% of that. Of course, the balance is considered incremental minority leakage. We haven't given any guidance yet as for the October distributions from Fertiglobe going forward. These are the material numbers that comprise the minority interest leakage. In terms of timing, just to complete the question, typically, you will see from the previous year's financial results, where we have consistently extracted dividends from Algeria, typically it tends to be around the Q3 of the year that the distributions associated with the prior fiscal year are made.
Okay. That's helpful. Thank you. The DEF question?
Yeah. With regards to DEF, we see a sizable opportunity. If you look at slide 13 of the deck, you can see the market globally growing at 8% per annum, and that's in metric urea tons equivalent. You're talking about 6 million tons worth of urea as DEF growing 7.5 million by 2026, a little over 7.5 million. That's a sizable increase. In terms of, our strategy and focus on it's a global strategy. It's been primarily a U.S. strategy driven by N-7, when we created a few years ago. I'm really happy to say that the team's done a great job of securing a fifth production site via off-take.
Now N-7 can distribute on map of 5 different production sites, making it solidly a number two in the United States for DEF and has established itself as a reliable supplier. What we like about DEF is that, it continues to grow as you can see in the growth prospects there. When you add it to an SCR engine, you improve diesel efficiency. It's predictable. What we're doing and focus on is to continue to grow our customer service capabilities. We've achieved, as we said in, I think, one of the prior conference calls, some fixed price arrangements and have moved off of the NOLA urea contract structure, which is obviously relevant when you look at, the volatility that there's been in NOLA urea, whether up or down.
For us, that's been important. We see the downstream urea, equivalent values of DEF are multiple thousands of dollars. We saw particularly in Europe, in the last several months, that DEF was trading at 3 times the price of granular urea for periods of time because of the less, the lower amounts of production. For us, it's quite strategic. We've been increasing production and shipments out of Fertiglobe. We have a project come online at the beginning of 2024 to add 300,000 tons of DEF or 100,000 tons of urea equivalent in OCI Nitrogen to improve the margins in the Netherlands. For us, it's a question of finding the customer base that we can securely get to and investing in some of the logistics.
There are some constraints around the sites with regards to water availability, et cetera, but what we do has been focused on incrementally pushing up. For example, in Iowa Fertilizer Company, we brought that plant online in 2017. The nameplate capacity for DEF was approximately 300,000 tons of DEF a year. Now we're we've achieved over 1 million tons of DEF and could potentially go to 1.3 million tons of DEF out of that site, one of the largest single, if not the largest single site of DEF production and distribution in the U.S. It's very much depending on the customer service, the logistical capabilities, not just what's at the site level.
Oh, thank you. Thank you very much for that answer. Thank you. Helpful.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Sam Perry from Credit Suisse. Please go ahead, Sam. Your line is now open.
Hi, guys. Thanks for taking the question. Just on the dividend policy, the floating proportion of the dividend, which is linked to free cash flow, in 23, will that be linked to the absolute level of free cash flow or the change in free cash flow year-over-year? If the latter, given sort of the outlook for product pricing, CapEx stepping up, et cetera, would it be fair to assume that could be zero? Thank you.
I can take a crack at that and maybe Hassan could go ahead. I mean, I'd say that the base is $400 million. The floating annually is what's above that level. It's not a hard and fast formula to your question. It's the one where we look to distribute substantially all of the free cash flow that's remaining after. At times, we also look into where our balance sheet is and how geared it is. You know, if we're, for example, in Fertiglobe, we have a net cash position to end December 2022.
You could see some additional distributions where you get leverage to the right level, on an absolute and through the cycle basis, still taking into account our investment grade policy to be able to continue to provide, additional distributions above the base level.
Thanks. Makes sense.
Nothing to add to that answer.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Lisa De Neve from Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead, Lisa. Your line is now open.
Hi, everyone. Thank you for taking my question. I have one on clean ammonia and methanol. You're now in the process of building this 1 million ton per year of blue ammonia plant in Texas. I just wanted to check what your ambitions are on the clean methanol side for potentially the U.S. plants there. Then from your conversations with potential customers, I mean, do customers have a preference towards progressing with clean ammonia over methanol as a fuel or vice versa? If so, why? Thank you.
Yeah, Lisa, good question. We look at all the opportunities that are out there. I wouldn't kind of rank clean ammonia or clean methanol one over the other. We go to where there's value and what we can do leveraging our existing production base and distribution base. You know, for us, we see really the ammonia markets on the clean ammonia side going into the power sector to decarbonize power heavily in East Asia, potentially in Europe. We also see it as a mechanism to move low carbon hydrogen, green or blue, into other markets to potentially be cracked into hydrogen where there's regulatory value for hydrogen, particularly, for example, in places like Europe over time.
With regards to methanol, we could also see it in the power space, we're starting to see it on kind of small, power applications on a clean and low carbon methanol side being used for, stranded areas that can't get power and use diesel generators, but they want to do so in an environmentally conscious way. We see complementary demand actually a little bit different otherwise, than where ammonia is at, where we see methanol as a vehicular fuel and as a marine fuel. Quite complementary, quite diversified in terms of outputs. You know, when you look at methanol and ammonia, it's comprising over 50% of hydrogen today and being much higher energy densities than hydrogen in itself.
We see a robust opportunity set in both the clean ammonia and the clean methanol markets in quite different spaces where we can decarbonize them. When it comes to projects, you're right to point out, both the Texas project and as well the recently signed EPC on the Abu Dhabi project. Our focus there is to bring production that is low cost and advantage online as quickly as possible. With regards to doing so, being able to get a lot of our cash back from the CapEx that's there. Leverage, in the case of Fertiglobe, we can leverage project financing at times to get there, get that done.
We can get conciliatory financing at times, and we can get, subsidies like you see in Texas with the Inflation Reduction Act, providing the 45Q program to decrease our cost of hydrogen, make us globally competitive. Lastly, we are almost at all times looking at leveraging existing assets, so we have to decrease the amount of CapEx and work. You're not doing a pure greenfield. You're leveraging an existing port, existing storage, existing distribution systems, existing plant nearby, all of the above when we're doing these types of projects so that we can get in on a low CapEx basis, a low replacement cost, and be comfortable with the dynamics and being able to serve those markets. That's our general strategy.
One part of your question was on clean methanol. I kind of walked through, kind of a preview of what we're doing on the gasification side, which we're applying to the Innovation Fund on the EUIF. We're very excited about that project. To the extent the EU Innovation Fund is secured, we'll find out later this year, as well as potential Dutch government support. You know, we could see great value there because when you look at the draft regulations coming in on the EU maritime side versus VLSFO, very low sulfur fuel oil, and versus diesel, which are having CO2 charges, we could see that the current, at current kind of...
Sorry, at forward pricing, 2025, 2026 VLSFO and diesel pricing and CO2 pricing, the equivalent value to methanol will be over EUR 1,300 a ton. That's the opportunity set we're after, which is get into the low cost base, leverage existing infrastructure, leverage financial support grants, leverage financing, and use all of the above to target markets that will be deserving a premium when there's regulatory value and CO2 is charged on end user.
Thank you. That's super helpful. Thank you very much.
Thank you. As another reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad now. We have no further questions on the telephone, I'll hand over to Hans.
Thank you. There are a few questions, webcast questions, and the first one is outside of prices, any other drivers that contributed to the negative free cash flow of Q4 2022 versus Q4 2021?
Yeah, I can take that question. I mean, yeah, we did report that on a Q4 basis, looking at the free cash flow metric, which we report, which is the free cash flow before growth CapEx and after minority distribution was approximately breakeven for Q4. The Q4 had a concentration of distributions, including the actual payout of the Fertiglobe dividends. There's around $375 million of minorities leakage associated with that. We also had a lumpy distribution quarter from EBIC, where over $40 million was upstreamed, and also some distributions for Metco. The combined total of minorities distributions during that or distributions to minorities during Q4 was a little bit lumpy of around $427 million.
You also had a concentration of maintenance CapEx in Q4, maybe close to 40% of maintenance CapEx was deployed in Q4, reflecting the heavy turnaround program that we had during the quarter. It's also typically a high interest payment quarter as well. A combination of factors really. That's why usually it's good to look at the business on a rolling basis rather than a specific quarter per se.
The next question is also from the web. It is, do you expect BioMCN to restart fully due to lower European gas prices?
It's a good question. Today European gas price sits at $17 in MMBtu. That puts the cash cost similar to where we see the cash cost of ammonia. I f you can ballpark, it'll be similar for methanol. Cash cost of ammonia excluding CO2 is over $650 a ton. By definition, cash cost for methanol is gonna be in that same range excluding CO2. I would not put it at a near term possibility because we're seeing methanol pricing in the $350-$400 range right now in Europe.
But that's exactly why we're excited about the low carbon future and prospects here because to the extent European, gas is staying high, which is what the forward curve is showing, which is supportive for our nitrogen business, we're developing this project which will be independent of natural gas pricing and will be based on a feedstock, like I said, that is biomass related or and waste related, which have an entirely different pricing set. That waste is converted into syngas, just like natural gas is converted into syngas and used and sold into a market that has a higher regulatory value for that low carbon methanol.
To your answer, to restart it on gray methanol does not make sense for us at this point, and that's why we've been monetizing over the last couple of years some of the EUAs, which are the CO2 credits we no longer have to give away for lack of production. Those come down over time, as you may know.
Thanks, Ahmed. Question is, reading your outlook in the press release, do you expect a stronger Q1 performance compared to the Q4 in terms of EBITDA and cash flow?
Yeah. You know, unfortunately, we don't provide guidance on a quarter-to-quarter basis. We're in the middle of the quarter right now, but generally we don't provide specific guidance on that front.
I think the next question was also on outlook. The next question is: How do you see the current shareholder's value, and are you starting up a buyback program to bring shareholder value back compared to 2022 while fundamentals remain still robust?
Yeah, it's a good question as well. You know, you saw a chart that Hassan was walking through a little bit earlier. We saw that a lot of shareholder value was created by just delevering from the higher leverage levels we had a few years ago to the levels we're at today. A lot of that was cemented in that way. Obviously our share price has drifted lower over the last several months. In terms of returning capital to shareholders, that can be in the form of dividends is what we've done in the past, or capital... We're returning capital back to shareholders in that way.
It's always a possibility to look at share buybacks, just not something we've done recently, and it's something that it would be discussed at our board level and considered, particularly in light of some of the lower share prices we've seen now. This is slide 8 I was referring to. Not slide 8, sorry. Slide Hassan, if you have it in front of you, let's see which slide it was. Slide 7.
Yeah. Yeah, slide seven. Yeah.
Next question is, with current fertilizer prices and expectations into 2023, do you expect a higher than proposal-based dividends in 2023?
Yeah. I mean, I'm happy to take that question. I think it's a continuation of the previous question to some extent. As we covered earlier in the call, we've already announced our intention for the April distribution. That number has been fixed, three and a half euros per share. I think as we will determine our approach for the October distribution as we get closer to the date and as we see how markets evolve. The calibration we do is a combination of looking at our, looking at the sort of market backdrop, looking at our how, look at our balance sheets, and of course, maintaining an investor grade framework.
Thanks. Thanks, Hassan. Next question is, in Q3, did you expect such a big drop in prices in the next quarter? What are the fundamentals to bring the upside back?
Ahmed, do you want to take that?
I was speaking to myself on mute. In Q3, we didn't expect to see as much of a decline in pricing, driven by the fact that there was one of the most, one of the warmest winters on record. I think one of the key aspects of the price sharp movement is that during a period of low liquidity, which you typically see in late Q4 and early Q1 for the typical buying in kind of late February that we see in the US and the big push in Europe, during that period of low liquidity, you had gas go from in November, around the time, a little bit after the conference call, I think we were looking at $60 MMBtu gas in Europe, and it collapsed.
You know, we all know the discussion going into the winter and concerns in Europe of outages and securing supply. Europe did a great job of securing inventory for natural gas. It had the good fortune, I think it was good fortune to have a very warm winter, so less draws on that gas.
That really changed the outlook a lot more sharply than we would have anticipated on marginal costs, which as that's happening, and you're having discussions with some customers who are looking to buy nitrates fertilizers, urea fertilizers, some customers looking at ammonia, they'll step back a little bit, and they wanna see, "Well, where does this shake out?" and we've seen, the pricing of gas drop, to 20 and, the $17, $18 MMBtu a day, MMBtus that we've been seeing now. I'd say that's been probably the most critical factor. On the flip side of that, I think that affordability has really accelerated on the industrial side because of the lower pricing.
Affordability on the nitrogen side was already decent, and now it's gotten much stronger, particularly for urea, but also for nitrates. I'd say that we're gonna see larger demand, but it's much, it is lower pricing than what we've seen in the last few months or what we anticipated in November.
Thank you, Ahmed. The next question is, why was maintenance in Fertiglobe carried out during the usually strong Q4 ? Ahmed.
Sorry, Hassan. I was going to say with maintenance, it was carried, usually we carry out maintenance, carry it out every 4 years for most plants, plus or minus. And you plan a maintenance or turnaround 1 to 2 years in advance. You order equipment, you get contractors secured, et cetera. It's hard to time the markets around what's the best price because, obviously Q4 pricing was quite strong in Fertiglobe, both for urea as well as ammonia, for where we had our production outages in Egypt and as well as in the UAE. But those were pre-planned turnarounds and we executed them.
The plants have been running very well since those turnarounds have taken place. We couldn't delay them further. We tried to the extent possible when setting them, doing them during periods of lower liquidity as we did. Obviously, that was part of the result of the lower free cash flow that we saw, this last year. Lower EBITDA and lower free cash flow because our utilization rates had, these Egyptian and Emirati plants offline for such a long period of time. That's important to kind of keep in mind and , as we continue on our operational excellence program, as we get turnarounds done, that'll put us in a better position.
I will say that there have been several of our peers in the nitrogen space who have come out and delayed turnarounds publicly in the last 12 months. We anticipate with this lower pricing environment we've seen in the last month or two, that we're gonna see quite a bit of turnaround activity towards the summertime period and later in the year in this space, which could help when prices are on the lower side. You know, demand is not, post-season demand is not high, absorb and create tightness in the market.
Thanks, Ahmed. Next question is, any plan to use free cash flow in 2023 to buy back any debt, specifically 2025 notes, or to refinance them?
Yeah. I'm happy to answer that question. Now, we as we mentioned in the previous calls, we, constantly monitor our capital structure. Of course, we will look to refinance outstanding debt at the appropriate time if we see an economic benefit. Of course, to maintain a conservative long duration balance sheet. Our weighted average cost of debt at year-end was around 4.6%. I think it will continue to be in the area of 5%. We'll evaluate future debt issuances as needed going forward.
Awesome. The next question is, will you continue to provide volumes by segment data in your presentations each quarter? I think this is the first time you have provided this detail. That is correct, if I can answer that. As we have had this question from several of our investors to provide these data, and we will continue to provide them going forward. I think that is the last question from the web as well. I'd like to hand back to Ahmed unless there are any questions coming through.
Yeah. Thanks, everybody, for the questions on the conference call as well as via the webcast. We'll look forward to continuing to give you more updates in our next discussion on the project as well as the developments of OCI. Bye.
Thank you.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's call. Thank you for joining. You may now disconnect your line.